Keir Starmer, the former director of public prosecutions, said failing to report allegations of child sexual abuse should be made a criminal offence in Britain. Photograph: BBC

Teachers and health workers should be prosecuted for failing to alert the police to allegations of child abuse, according to the former director of public prosecutions, who is calling for an overhaul of the law to prevent more victims from slipping through the net.

Keir Starmer QC, who left his role as Britain's top prosecutor last week, becomes the most senior official to call for the introduction of mandatory reporting following a string of high-profile cases, including the Jimmy Savile scandal, in which victims of the TV and radio star were repeatedly failed by the social care system.

In an interview with BBC1's Panorama programme to be aired on Monday, Starmer says: "I think the time has come to change the law and close a gap that's been there for a very long time. I think there should be a mandatory reporting provision."

Starmer says Britain should be brought into step with countries such as the US, Canada and Australia, where it is a criminal offence for care professionals not to report child abuse allegations to the authorities.

"The problem is, if you haven't got a central provision requiring people to report, then all you can do is fall back on other provisions that aren't really designed for that purpose and that usually means they run into difficulties. What you really need is a clear, direct law that everybody understands," he says.

His intervention comes a year after it was revealed that Savile, who died in 2011, had abused hundreds of victims at schools, hospitals and BBC premises over five decades.

Savile was never apprehended, despite high-level concerns over his behaviour and complaints to police and care workers.

The debate over mandatory reporting was reignited in September following the death of Daniel Pelka, the four-year-old who was tortured and starved by his mother and stepfather at his home in Coventry.

Starmer says: "I think this is a very real issue that has been with us for a very long time. You can go back to the 50s and probably earlier to find examples, but you can find many more recent examples, and it's a very simple proposition: if you're in a position of authority, and you have cause to believe that a child has been abused, you really ought to do something about it."

The programme hears from two abuse victims, including a woman who says she was attacked at Stoke Mandeville hospital in 1977 when she was 12.

She was allegedly raped by Savile while recovering from an operation to have her tonsils removed. Despite telling a nurse, she says she was told to keep quiet.

The woman's solicitor, Liz Dux, said her client was "failed by people entrusted to keep her safe" and was speaking out for the first time to call for a mandatory reporting law.

"If there had been a compulsion to report, these victims may have been spared," said Dux, of the law firm Slater & Gordon.

"We call upon the government to take steps to introduce legislation where those in regulated activities who have direct knowledge of abuse and fail to report it could also face prosecution. This will better protect those in the future."

The Catholic church and the Church of England, which have both faced a series of high-profile child abuse allegations in the past year, also tell the programme that they back mandatory reporting.

The Right Rev Paul Butler, head of safeguarding at the Church of England, said: "We have to think of the child first, not ourselves, not the institution – what's best for the child."

However, the Department for Education said mandatory reporting was "not the answer" and there were no plans to change the law.

A spokesman for the department said: "Guidance is already crystal clear that professionals should refer immediately to social care when they are concerned about a child.

"Other countries have tried mandatory reporting and there is no evidence to show that it is a better system for protecting children. In fact there is evidence to show it can make children less safe."